The man pressed his cheek with the side of his thumb, leaving a faintly gleaming grease mark. “I do have a selection of messages appropriate to the occasion.”
“Could I send one back?”
“You could try. But I might not be able to find the gentleman you are looking for. That is sometimes a problem.”
“If you can’t find him do I get a refund?”
‘Yes, but only half. I have to cover my expenses.”
“Where did you meet the professor?”
“In Cullawee.”
“That in Alabama?”
“Arkansas.”
“Whoa. I’m way behind.”
“Life has swept him along like a leaf before the wind.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s doing fine, but last I saw of him he was in a hurry to be on the road.”
“Where to?”
“I believe he is heading west.”
“I’m going to miss him,” Delvin said, and as he said this he experienced a pulpy plummeting feeling in his chest and a dampness in his eyes. He looked down the street where two men in dusty clothes were backing a mule up to a buckboard. The cuffs of the men’s pants were ragged and the shoes of one were tied around with hanks of pale cloth. Mules going contrary all over the city, he thought, the words like a sentence he wanted to write down.
“So no return,” the little man said.
“What’s that?”
“On the message?”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“Ah, well,” Mr. Rome said, looking around without much relish. “Maybe I will find some business in this town.”
“All your work long-distance?”
“Only about half. I get just as much local as out-of-town. I’ve begun to prefer the in-town, actually.”
“Why’s that?”
The man had taken a seat across from Delvin. He was so small that the tabletop came up to his puffy chest. “It’s hard to make a profit of these long journeys.”
“You travel by train.”
“Boxcar class, yes.”
“You been on the western roads?”
“Have I? You name the line, I’ve ridden it. I’ve been a passenger on the Espy, the GN, the Katy, the Octopus, the old Cough & Snort, the Damn Rotten Grub, the UP. . You traveled in the west?”
“No, not me. But I’m about to catch a ride out this afternoon, headed northeast.”
Mr. Rome said like as how he would be leaving town himself.
“Thought you were looking for local business.”
“These little towns don’t often care for my services. They’re packed so tight they don’t need me. Sometimes though — well, you never can tell.”
Delvin got up and they walked together down the dusty street that smelled of hardwood fires and the sweet tang of summer dusk to the camp. Later that afternoon, with Josie, they caught an eastbound L&S freight.
The sun snagged in the naked branches of a far-off grove of dead trees. Through the trees Delvin could see glints and lusters where some body of water caught the light.
In an empty wood-paneled B&O line boxcar Delvin settled in next to a skinny older negro man carrying a greasy carpetbag. The car smelled of the dried corn it had most recently transported. The man smelled of road wear and animal grease. He introduced himself as Frank Brooks.
Delvin introduced Mr. Rome, who was pressed up against the front wall of the car. The waning daylight shone through the boxcar’s open door.
Mr. Rome said he might return to his home base up in Roanoke. “I miss the smell of the hemlocks,” he said.
The man Frank was traveling from the west — Phoenix, he said, where he had a wife and two children.
At the other end of the car a few white men sat with their bindles. There was race mixing on the trains, but without much friendliness. People sought those they took to be their own, were nervous about other races. Negroes were called dinges, shines, skillets, by the whites, the whites, ofays, slicks, jeffs, by the negroes. Bindlestiffs, beefers, zips — the criminal element — were enough of a concern without adding racial confusions to the mix. Delvin, no longer an angelica or a gonsil, no longer a reg, was now a stamper, maybe a jack, so taken by some or would be soon enough.
Frank, this new fellow, a jack, settling his back carefully against the warped boxcar wall, said last week he’d seen a fight where a jeff—“big pink-faced monstrosity”—had thrown an africano man off a train. The fight had got more than one hurt, on both sides, Frank said. “Like you couldn’t trade out of it,” he said, raising a grimy cap that reveled a lighter tan forehead, “like you got somebody there — some colored man — who all of a sudden lost his everything, you know, like some magic act done took away his humanness—Get dis sack off the train. You look at it, think I got to the wrong world. It’s a mistake.”
“I steer clear,” Mr. Rome said.
“Can’t always do that,” Frank said picking at his bottom teeth with a split twig he’d fished from the inner pocket of his tattered salt-and-pepper jacket.
“That is true,” Mr. Rome said with a sigh.
Josie had not come into the boxcar. He was up top or riding on one of the empty flatcars. He said he preferred the open air. Delvin half wanted to go with him, but then he decided to get in the boxcar and try to sleep. He’d felt tired lately, as if the complications of the world outside prison were too much for him; he figured he had to build up a tolerance. When he mentioned this to Mr. Rome, the little man told him he was just feeling the burden of the colored man.
“These white folks are unrightly the black man’s burden,” he said. “Their foolishness and ignorance.” He sat up straighter and looked around, a tiny person of color alone in the kingdom. Delvin asked — off-handedly — if Mr. Rome could give examples of some of his more interesting messages. He was thinking about a bath, a tub somebody’d told him about, carved out of rock in a far island stream under shaggy trees.
“Sans names,” Mr. Rome said. “Nor revealing details. That way it’s not really divulging secrets.” He straightened up and his face brightened. “I am standing under this here tree holding a hatful of cherries,” one began, he said; it was, like many of the others, a plea for a lover’s return. “I can’t sleep at night without you by my side,” another declared, a plea from an older woman—“You’d think she might be young,” Mr. Rome said — to her wandering husband of nearly fifty years. Another time a one-legged man stranded in a town by a frozen lake in Minnesota pleaded for his sweetheart to relent. “‘Your love could melt this icy world and set me free,’” Mr. R quoted in a hushed and passionate voice.
“What you talking about there?” the man Frank said, friendly, working a bit of string between his fingers like a weave. “You some kinda—”
“Oh, no, my son,” Mr. Rome said, and Delvin chimed in that Mr. O. P. Rome was a professional message carrier.
“Yes,” Mr. Rome said. “Declarationist, full-throated pleader and issuer of challenges and stomp-footed assertations. No word spoken too softly or too loudly for me not to be able to carry its full weight. Nothing loses a ounce on the journey — to whoever, or whatever — I once carried a message to a speckle-faced mule — is able to pay the fee. For a dime I’ll carry a message across the room or up to four blocks away. Higher prices the farther I have to go, but I will not only carry an exact rendition of your missive, I will provide the appropriate — that is to say, your own, or what you wish to have as your own, feelings, complete with intonations, speech quirks or added gustatives, per message, limit three to a customer.”
“You aint never heard of Western Union?” Frank said, shuffling himself into a better seat.
“Primitive upstarts,” Mr. Rome said. “I follow a profession as old as talking itself.”